This Is How We Do It!

We had to go to the grocery and I asked Samantha what she wanted to wear. She knew exactly what: "My new blue dress!", paired oddly with her green rubber rain boots. Hey! my girl can rock anything she wants! To her dismay it is entirely way too hot to wear rubber rain boots in June in Texas, so she decided on purple sparkles. Of course she was excellent at the store (even better than usual and with no snacks needed), however, she kept telling me that we needed apple sauce and I could hear other customers around me chuckling. I can only assume they were chuckling at her telling me our grocery list, which apple sauce was not on! :)

After nap, we went to the park to run around. What's nice about being on a later schedule than most people is you get the park to yourself while everyone else is eating dinner!

 Making an elephant with black pebbles.

It's been a couple weeks that we have been counting objects with Sam. She can count from 1-14, but we are working with her to point and count objects. It gets very frustrating at times because I know she can do it and is being lazy (she'll get up to 7 at the most with 10 as my goal), but Daddy reminds me that she is only two and a half and we have to be patient: "Work on colors, shapes and animals, all the things she already knows, so she doesn't shut down from learning more", he says. He suggested having her count random things throughout the day which I thought was an excellent idea!  We did it this morning and at the park while swinging, I had her look around while I asked How many: mama-cars? mamas? Say Says? swings? slides?, etc.  She did great AND she started using her fingers! So when I asked how many grandmas she had, she held up two fingers and said "This many", which is odd for her to do, but she got it! She was never one of those kids that you asked "How old are you?" and would hold up two fingers and say "This many." She would just tell you, "I'm two [years old]". Anyhoo, working on counting objects like this is great and not frustrating and she's enjoying it more... and so am I!
She is also beginning to get her pronouns correct more often!